Redesign Your Life: Marge Piccini On Finding 'Zones Of Brilliance'

Are you going through life with a catcher's mitt on, responding as things come at you fast and furious?

For many people, September is the beginning of a new year — a time to make fresh starts, reassess goals and priorities, tackle new challenges, pivot into new endeavors, embrace change. But managing change can be difficult, even unnerving.

And one reason is that people at mid-life far too frequently have trouble identifying what Marge Piccini calls their "zones of brilliance."

If you wrote down everything you're competent at — even highly accomplished at — on post-it notes, you could probably cover a conference table. But, says Piccini, who works as a life design mentor, "out of all those stickies, there are just a few that are your true zone of brilliance."

"Most people go through life with a catcher's mitt on, just catching and responding to everything that comes at them, and things come at them fast and furious." Piccini helps her clients shift from white-knuckling their way through life as things get thrown at them, to being the pitcher — in essence, to deciding what they want to do and taking charge of how they live.

Typically, she says, there is a "cataclysmic moment" — some sort of crash and burn, or to keep the baseball analogy going, a curve ball — when people realize they are stressed, stretched, and their lives are out of balance. It can be the loss of a job or a relationship, a health crisis, or even just the feeling that they simply cannot continue on the same path any longer.

"They just can't avoid it anymore. What has to happen is that they have to have made the decision — I call it the declaration of independence — that they want to stop living the way they're living and to create a whole new life experience for themselves."

Piccini herself had that experience back in 2007. She and her husband were running a successful boutique mortgage brokerage when she made an unexpected trip to France to comfort a former exchange student who had spent a year of high school with them in South Windsor. Piccini discovered that she had forgotten to pack her phone charger — and in the unplanned disconnect from her responsibilities back home, she realized how unhappy and overwhelmed she felt about her work.

"I realized I had built this life that looked really, really beautiful from the outside but felt empty to me," she recalls. "I decided I didn't want it anymore, but I had no idea what I was going to do, how I was going to transition." To her surprise, with the unexpected gift of time to reflect, she found herself visualizing herself talking to large groups — a prospect that terrified her — and helping to empower people to discover or rediscover their more authentic selves.

The collapsing real estate market that followed a year later helped give her the push to pursue her new direction. She now works with individual clients — many of them "over-achieving over-achievers," she says, but who still "see themselves always as half-empty" — and she plans to introduce group sessions later this fall.

Nancy Schoeffler / nschoeffler@courant.com

Nancy Schoeffler / nschoeffler@courant.com

For many successful women, their intellect has been the driver of their life, but, Piccini says, "we cast so much of ourselves aside in order to do what we have to do." Rather than tap into just the intellectual engine — spending all our time trying to solve our problems in our head — Piccini works to help people align themselves to draw from their emotional engine and spiritual engine as well, to put their lives in clearer balance.

Kim Pita, a recent client, was rebounding from divorce, had walked away from a highly successful marketing agency she had co-founded with her now ex-husband and was trying to cope with her mentally ill sister's tragic death when she met Piccini.

"At that point I wasn't really ready for a coach, nor did I think I needed a coach," Pita says. But during a casual cup of coffee together, when she talked about the wide array of marketing services she had begun offering on her own, she was struck by Piccini's insistence that she ought to zero in on what makes her special.

"She said, 'Wow, you do so much.' I asked, too much? 'Waaay too much.' That stuck with me. ... I thought, how do I find my magic?" Pita recalls. "I had no idea."

During the six months that she was Piccini's client, Pita says, Piccini helped her "to look inside myself, who I wanted to be, where I wanted to go. ... She helped me really narrow down who I am and what I do," which as it turns out, is offering marketing services for family-owned businesses, which have a particular culture and dynamic that she understands from her own experience.

In May, Piccini presented "Inspire! Women's Leadership Retreat" to inspire women to "ignite a life, career and business that they love." She plans to present a similar program on Oct. 1.

"It's for women who sense that their life can be so much more, but they can't figure out how to get there," she says.

For details on "Inspire! Women's Leadership Retreat" to be held Saturday, Oct. 1, at the Town & County Club in Hartford, go to www.margepiccini.com. The early-bird registration fee is $147 through Sept. 17; $247 thereafter.

Nancy Schoeffler / nschoeffler@courant.com

Nancy Schoeffler / nschoeffler@courant.com

Reconnecting with one's passion and redefining one's purpose takes work, Marge Piccini says, and it involves commitment — including homework. But she boiled down the process of getting started to five steps:

Say it:

that is, say what it is that you no longer want in your life, whether it's related to health, work, a relationship, and that will help make room for what you do want.

See it:

Visualize what you want and form a really clear picture of you experiencing that. Which leads to ...

Feel it:

Feel what it feels like for you to experience this change.

Believe it:

Believe that no matter how crazy an idea you think it is, if you have that idea, believe in it. You had that idea because it's possible, and it's possible for you.